Had we considered him at all, we might have expected him to go immediately to his family, but after all those days of travel from France to New York to San Diego to San Francisco, all those days of thinking, of pondering what his father had written him, he did exactly the opposite of what any of us would have expected, exactly the opposite even of what his father might have expected, not traveling immediately to Oakland to meet his family or even to Newcastle but instead remaining in San Francisco for a full day and then another, not at the army base either but in a flophouse near the docks where prostitutes and foreign sailors were known to comingle openly and without fear of arrest, all the while close enough to his father and mother and sisters that a leisurely walk of three or four hours might well have brought him to their new address. Even if they had no phone he might have reached a neighbor or a corner store and relayed a message, but no call came and so the parents did not even know that their son had returned home, or at least had returned to the country that had been his home, even though now there was no actual physical home to speak of, a fact made clear by the note that had arrived in his father’s hand and in clear, unambiguous English: We are no longer welcome at our old home in Newcastle. We have no friends there now. Find us at Cousin Ida’s. The address followed but it may as well have been written in ­German or Italian or even in Japanese, a language he could hardly speak and could not read at all. We are no longer welcome. We have no friends there now. Impossible.

And yet there was, even in his route, a sense of caution. Perhaps seeing, with his own eyes, that straw-haired woman and her children had made his father’s letter real to him, for before the removal, before the summer of 1942, Ray would have simply walked down the rows along a path worn not only by him and his father and mother and his two sisters but by Mr. Wilson and Helen and Jimmy too: down a single row of peach trees in a straight line, veering off to the left toward the Wilsons’ back door only after it reached the end of the row. But the spring of 1942 had come and gone and 1943 and 1944 too and now it was August and the war was over—the war in Europe and now, with the second atomic bomb, the war against Japan—and so although he could still see it in the grass between the trees, in actuality the path might as well have not been there at all.